See you Tuesday.

Sounds like Rosen lawyer Paul Sandler's line on a prosecution witness -- "so low in my opinion that he could crawl under the belly of a snake wearing a top hat" -- did the trick.

Then, one morning early in 2003, a half-dozen F.B.I. agents raided his office in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, according to one person who was there at the time. Mr. Rosen, composed as ever in his bespoke suit, stood talking to his lawyer and patron, Myron Cherry, while the agents herded his staff into the kitchen, rifled through drawers and downloaded Mr. Rosen's neatly, almost obsessively compiled records from computer hard drives.

"That's when it moved from surreal to real," said Chris Deri, a friend who worked with Mr. Rosen on Al Gore's Presidential campaign.

The 38-year-old Mr. Rosen, a consummate political salesman who started his career selling books door-to-door, didn't know it at the time, but he was already the subject of a sealed indictment by a federal grand jury in California. Now he's on trial in a federal court in Los Angeles, charged with three counts of filing false reports with the Federal Election Commission. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail and $250,000, and Mr. Rosen is expected to take the stand in the trial, which began May 10 and could last another two weeks. Mr. Rosen was Hillary Clinton's Finance director in 2000.

Clinton's enemies, as well as her defenders, have tried to cast this trial in broader political terms: the latest sign of Clintonian criminality for the Hillary haters, and the latest evidence of the right-wing conspiracy for her backers. And a partial F.B.I. recording leaked to the New Orleans Times-Picayune of a conversation between Mr. Rosen and another fund-raiser offers a hint that he may have considered passing the buck to Mrs. Clinton or one of her top aides:

"The former White House wanted to … argue the case in a certain way," the Times-Picayune quoted Mr. Rosen as saying. "And I did it for them. Like, I bit the bullet and went in as a guinea pig, and argued their argument for me. Instead of frettin' and runnin' and coverin' my ass, I was a good soldier …. So far it's worked out, but I coulda done it a lot different."

To Mrs. Clinton's organized critics, that's a tantalizing hint. But Mr. Rosen, whose friends say he places a high value on personal loyalty, has shown no sign of turning on his former boss. And so it's Mr. Rosen in the dock, even as the politicos on both sides whisper that the real culprits are elsewhere. Indeed, prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg has stressed Mrs. Clinton's innocence in an apparent effort to keep the jurors focused on Mr. Rosen.

"You will hear no evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in any way, shape or form," the assistant U.S. Attorney said in his opening statement. "In fact, it's just the opposite. The evidence will show that David Rosen was trying to keep this evidence from the campaign."

Unlikely Star

Mr. Rosen is, in many ways, an unlikely figure to occupy the center of a high-stakes prosecution involving names from the Clintons to Cher and Diana Ross. Though he has spent the last few years at the top of the high-stakes, high-gloss Democratic fund-raising world, with clients that include former Presidential candidates Dick Gephardt and Gen. Wesley Clark and Governors Tom Vilsack and Rod Blagojevich, he arrived late on the political scene, and through an unconventional route. Those who know him-including most of the major players in the Democratic Party-are wondering whether his bootstrap intensity and visible hunger mesh with the prosecution theory that he panicked over mounting unexpected expenses for the extravagances he commissioned as part of his fund-raising, like Cher's private jet.

The son of a doctor and a professor of religion, Mr. Rosen is an anomaly in the often blow-dried world of political fund-raising. He isn't the son of a major donor or politician, or a Washington insider, or a former political staffer. He is, he liked to remind his colleagues, a former door-to-door salesman with an ambition and intensity that grated on some of his peers, but which made him one of the Democratic Party's most successful money men.

(Attempts to reach Mr. Rosen at his office through his lawyer, Paul Sandler, didn't yield a response. Many of Mr. Rosen's associates, citing the ongoing prosecution, declined requests to comment for this story.)

Before Mr. Rosen switched to politics, he was the star salesman for Southwestern Co., a 150-year-old direct-selling company based in Tennessee, which dispatches thousands of college students to small towns every summer to sell educational books door to door. Dressed neatly in golf shirts and shorts, and up at 6 a.m., the salespeople are a feature of the small-town South and Southwest, and the program has a record of breeding politicians, from Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to former Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

Mr. Rosen was one of the best salesmen Southwestern ever had. He spent an unusual 10 years at the company, according to a company spokesman, after setting the record for first-year sales in 1984. He was so good that, by the time he left the company, he was making sales at five out of every six homes he visited, as a Southwestern official recalled to Crain's Chicago Business in 2002, when Mr. Rosen was listed as one of the magazine's top "Forty Under Forty." (Company officials declined to speak about Mr. Rosen for this story.)

Mr. Rosen told the magazine that his door-knocking experience translated smoothly into politics.

"You can use it whether you're selling airplanes, insurance or politicians," he said.

Mr. Rosen's life in Chicago, meanwhile, brought him unexpectedly into politics. Though he lacked family connections to Washington-he was married at the time to a Chicago police officer-he met a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, David Wilhelm, when Mr. Wilhelm was his professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Mr. Wilhelm put his eager student in touch with Democratic Party officials, and by the mid-1990's, Mr. Rosen was working full-time as a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee in Washington. His ability to cultivate Democratic Party donors twice his age impressed his peers, including Mr. Deri, who met him in the run-up to the 1998 Congressional elections, when Mr. Rosen was fund-raising for Vice President Al Gore's political-action committee in the Midwest and Mr. Deri was doing the same on the East Coast.

At a gathering of high-level donors in Nashville, Mr. Deri recalled, the staff fund-raisers were introduced from the stage, usually to a round of polite applause. Then Mr. Rosen was introduced.

"They said David's name, and it was like 100 grandparents at a combination graduation–bar mitzvah, and the guy had scored a touchdown," recalled Mr. Deri, who now works in public relations. "They just stood up and applauded. I remember, I called my wife afterward and I said, 'I don't know if I'm cut out for this. I don't have the intensity to have relationships with all these people in a way that I could ever elicit that kind of reaction.'"

"He was very successful because he was very good with people. He did things in a very soft way-I don't think he ever was a hard, demanding kind of guy," said Bill Singer, a prominent Chicago Democrat. "I would stand by him in a minute."

But what many donors found charming, some of Mr. Rosen's peers and subordinates found grating. He pushed his subordinates hard and bragged about his access to the rich and powerful-something that has proved embarrassing on leaked prosecution recordings of Mr. Rosen's conversations.

"He was the quintessential salesman," said a former colleague on the Clinton campaign, of which Mr. Rosen was national finance director. "He was a little freewheeling, but he was no dummy."

He also stood out in a world populated largely by well-coiffed young women who fit easily into the expensive world of big donors, and while some fund-raisers return again and again to established lists of donors, Mr. Rosen specialized in bringing in new money from Chicago entrepreneurs and other sources, people and companies that hadn't ever participated in politics before. He wore his confidence on his sleeve; in fact, he had a tailor periodically appear at his office to measure him for custom suits.

But Mr. Rosen was also unusually successful, one of the best in the business. Indeed, he viewed himself as a bringing a new kind of professionalism to a business of personal relationships and small shops. When he created his own company after the Clinton campaign, he called it the Competence Group-a thinly veiled criticism of some of his competitors.

"He was frustrated when sometimes his trade was done by somebody really junior or somebody who didn't have all the skills," Mr. Deri said. "He wanted to make it a profession."

And so the Competence Group, run out of the ground floor of a building he owns on Altgeld Street (Mr. Rosen lived upstairs) started big, with several employees and money from some of his wealthy connections.

"He always had to do things in a big way," said another Democratic fund-raiser.

People familiar with the business said that Mr. Rosen had financial support from a number of Democratic donors, including Myron Cherry, a lawyer and leading Chicago Democrat. A person who responded to a call to Mr. Cherry said that Mr. Cherry was "not an investor" in the business but didn't dispute the claim that the lawyer had given Mr. Rosen money. (The person who said he spoke for Mr. Cherry declined to give his name; the trial has made many of Mr. Rosen's friends skittish about speaking to the press.)

Sketchy Characters

Even with the shadow of the investigation hanging over him, Mr. Rosen prospered in the last campaign cycle, with two Presidential campaigns as clients. Just after the 2004 election, he married a former aide to Mrs. Clinton, Melissa Rochester, in Chicago. But since his indictment was unsealed on Jan. 7, the focus of his life has returned to the glitzy Hollywood fund-raiser held in August of 2000 and featuring performances by Cher, Michael Bolton and Melissa Etheridge. Tickets cost $25,000 per couple for dinner and $1,000 for the concert. The guests included Brad Pitt and Muhammad Ali.

The details of the case against Mr. Rosen are highly technical, but the gist is that he underestimated the expenses of the Hollywood fund-raiser. This would allegedly have been useful to the Clinton campaign, because it would free up "hard money"-limited contributions that could be used for television advertising under campaign-finance regulations, if they were not spent covering the fund-raiser's costs. But while the campaign reported costs around $400,000, prosecutors allege that expenses such as first-class commercial airfare for the stars' entourages and expensive hotel rooms drove the total price much higher.

The prosecutor told the Los Angeles jury that Mr. Rosen told friends about an earlier Clinton fund-raiser that had cost more than it took in, and that the repeat of such an event would be a "career killer."

"As costs mounted, this man began to panic," said Mr. Zeidenberg, the prosecutor, pointing at the seated Mr. Rosen. "What would happen if he screwed up twice in a row?"

The party was hosted by two men who are now-as Mrs. Clinton's lawyer likes to point out-both in federal custody on unrelated fraud charges.

One of them, Peter Paul, was a convicted felon who has since served time in a Brazilian prison and is now awaiting sentencing on a stock-fraud conviction. Mr. Paul, who filed suit against Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clinton, was the celebrity wrangler for the Los Angeles fund-raiser.

Mr. Rosen's lawyer has argued that his client was duped by con men. And he has told friends that it wasn't his job to vet Peter Paul, whose earlier criminal conviction would have been expected to raise flags with the Secret Service vetters and with the Washington law firm of Ryan, Phillips, Utrecht and MacKinnon, which was also vetting participants in the campaign. (Howard Wolfson, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said Ryan Phillips would have no comment on its role in the fund-raiser.)

Mr. Paul, who has launched a campaign to pin the alleged campaign violations on Mrs. Clinton, told The Observer that neither the prosecution nor the defense case makes sense, and that he would only have given money at the Clintons' own urging.

"David Rosen couldn't convince me to give anyone anything," he said.

Mr. Rosen's loyalty to the Clintons has been repaid, so far, by fierce defenses from Clinton spokespeople and quiet support from his cadre of donors. And the trial, in which most of the witnesses seem to hail from one corner or other of a sleazy underworld, hasn't painted a flattering picture of the world of political fund-raising that Mr. Rosen mastered.

"What happened to David is what happens to everyone involved in this world," Mr. Deri said. "You're put in contact with sketchy characters all the time, and part of your job is to take direction as to who you're supposed to be in contact with."

We also try to untangle the troubled Sharpton-Ferrer relationship. And we claim partial, er, credit for starting the trouble.

Matt Schuerman explores Governor Pataki's, so far fruitless, efforts to wring money for a rail tunnel out of his Republican allies in Washington.

And Lizzy Ratner spent a whole lot of time, well, researching the Prime Grill, world center of Kosher power noshing.

And Jess Bruder heaps the requisite amount of scorn on that new New York theme song you all loved so much, and interviews composer Frank Wildhorn (third item).

Also, the Forward's E.J. Kessler makes a cameo with her take on the Democrats' efforts to pick up congressional seats.

The details of the Clinton case are extremely technical, but leaked prosecution court filings reveal a "mystery witness" in the case against Clinton fundraiser David Rosen. This witness is a family member of a prominent Democrat whom the Justice Department has apparently been using as an informant in investigations of at least two other political figures, we assume Democrats, since 2002.

This person -- the Sun suggests it's a man, based on one reference to "he" -- is working for the feds to escape prosecution on bank fraud charges. Here are the clues:

-Related to "an extremely prominent and well-known political figure."
-Active in fundraising for the Democratic Party.
-Assisted in the U.S. Senate campaign of Hillary Clinton.
-Also used in an investigation in Louisiana involving a state senator and a $5 million state contract.
-Also used in an investigation into a prominent Democrat suspected of laundering contributions from foreign nationals.

Given the Louisiana connection, it should be possible to figure out who this person is, no? And we can already hear the words "fishing expedition" sounding from the Democratic side of the aisle.

Donnie Fowler, the candidate for D.N.C. chairman, has literally erased his ties to the fallen fund-raiser.

On Dec. 22nd, Mr. Fowler's P.R. team posted a press release on its website announcing the members of the Fowler finance team:

"Today, Donnie Fowler, candidate for Democratic National Committee Chairman, announced the leadership of his National Finance Team. ... Joining the Fowler Campaign as National Finance Directors are former Kerry Eastern Finance Director Stephanie Berger and former Wesley Clark presidential campaign Mid-Atlantic Finance Director Rachel Hirschberg. Former Clark campaign Midwestern Finance Director David Rosen will also serve on the committee." [Ital. added]

But now that tell-tale last line is missing from the press release. Gone! It seems that shortly after the bad news of Mr. Rosen's indictment hit the wires, one of Mr. Fowler's campaign elves went back to the old press release and removed Mr. Rosen's name. Deleted him. Erased him. Expunged all evidence of him. Poof! No more Mr. Rosen, no more P.R. problem.

... And critics say this Fowler guy is an amateur!

Andrea Brake felt anything but sexy sitting on a bench in the trend-conscious shoe store Otto Tootsi Plohound on lower Fifth Avenue early in September, ready to plunk down $300 for the right pair of boots.

"I found some tall boots with a medium-sized heel," said the lithe, 5-foot-8 graphic designer and yoga enthusiast. "I got it about midway up my calf. The zipper would not go any farther. I tried sort of, like, shoving my skin, pushing it in. I was smooshing the flesh, to no avail." As indifferent salespeople rushed around trying to serve a crush of boot-mad New Yorkers, recounted Ms. Brake, "I developed a blister on my index finger from trying so hard to pull the zipper."

Life ain't so boot-iful either for Vanessa Mobley, a 30-year-old editor at Basic Books, who recalls looking on, aghast, as a friend tried on boots at the Calvin Klein store in Soho. "She is by no means heavy," said Ms. Mobley, "but they were zip-up boots and they had been built to some arbitrary circumference. Her calf was too big, and the people at the store tried to convince her that there was this whole method of squeezing her flesh into the boot, which was just like you squeeze, squeeze.… It's like your leg is a sausage and you have to squeeze it into the casing , and she did this, but they barely fit. And she bought them anyway! I was deterred, repulsed. I was like, 'I'm not casing my leg–no way.'"

The last time knee-high boots were this popular, in the mod 1960's and hippy-dippy 1970's, women had soft, ethereal, pliant calves. A couple of aerobic decades, however, have carved a new, firm, decisive calf which stubbornly defies the lean, mean cuts of the mostly Italian designers who are capitalizing on the Charlie's Angels - Almost Famous revival. Which has left scores of women chagrined about not being able to zip up this season's boots and asking themselves, What, a new body part I have to feel insecure about ?

"It's sort of a point of view," said Miranda Morrison, one-half of the Nolita shoe-design team Sigerson Morrison, whose boots are notorious for their cruelly slim cuts (this season, you will pay from $350 to $600 for a calf measurement of about 33 centimeters). "We made a decision when we started the company to cater to the shapeliest legs, just because that's how the product looks the best. I mean, you know there are companies who try and fit everybody, and the result is that, for a lot of stylish girls, their boots fit like Wellingtons !"

'Break Out the Pliers'

At the 1195 Third Avenue branch of Nine West, the ubiquitous shoe chain, boots have been flying out of the store to the tune of 250 pairs per week, claimed assistant manager Zipporah Gales. But she said she doesn't always have an easy time marrying boot to customer.

"The calf has me a little confused," Ms. Gales said. "I'll make assumptions and pull out a particular boot for that person, thinking that their calf will fit it, but a lot of women are working out now, and some of the smallest women have really large calves and can't even begin to get into it. And then you'll see the biggest women, but it fits their calf just fine! One customer, I saw it coming when they were pulling it up, I was like, 'No, I don't think that's the boot for you.' I was going to suggest another one, but she was like, 'No, I gotta have this boot.' She zipped it up and she could not get it back down, whatsoever.

"I had to break out the pliers," Ms. Gales concluded.

"Yes, there are people who get stuck," said a harried saleswoman at Tootsi Plohound. "But it's a really common thing, it happens all the time, you just try to zip up and unclog the leather that's clogging the zipper. Sometimes you cut the leather." (Customers are not charged for the extraction.)

A few blocks west at Jeffrey, the meat-packing-district Barneys doppelganger which is famed for its shoe department, David Rosen was foisting narrow-cut Guccis and Pradas on anyone who could squeeze in. "A lot of women are having trouble," he said. "You do something like a graphite pencil, rub it on to help the zipper go easier." If that doesn't work, Mr. Rosen gently steers his fat-calved customers to Helmut Lang and Marc Jacobs, which he said are cutting boots wider this season, or the lace-up version from Christian Dior. "Or there are the stretch suedes–you just pull 'em up!"

But if you want the sleek, zip-up boots that render men weak?

"People that rollerblade and run–it's not just fat legs, you know?" sighed Mr. Rosen. "If you work out, you're going to have problems . I know a lot of women who rollerblade, and they just can't do it. They have to wear ankle boots."

On Thompson Street at Sacco, a store known for its convincing Prada knock-offs, assistant manager Ed Pizano bragged of a special machine that helps ease women into the boots of their choice.

"It's just a leg machine," he said. "You put the boot in, and then you turn the knob and it stretches the leather. As long as you can zip it up more than halfway up the boot, it can be stretched. If it's by the anklebone and you can't zip up, you can't stretch that– but at least 95 percent of the time, they can be stretched."

But sometimes no amount of fiddling, stretching and squashing will work. Enter the "compromise" boot (a concept with which New York women are quite familiar, from boyfriends to apartments). You settle for a model that is just O.K., that has some good features–you try to like it, to learn to live with it, all the while keeping an eye peeled in case something better comes along.

"I saw the debut of the tall boot and thought that they were fabulous ," said Jennifer Barnett, 28, a size-8 (body) and size-7 (shoe) production manager at Elle magazine, whose thrice-weekly Stairmastering has produced stubborn little calves. "I tried on so many. The first time I tried them on, I tried every pair in the store and I was like, 'I can't believe these don't fit.' I would get them a quarter of the way up and there was no hope for me. I tried wearing super-contorting, super-controlling pantyhose and that totally didn't work. I kept searching and searching and searching . I went to Bloomingdale's, I went to Saks. I went to Kenneth Cole. I went everywhere–I was on a huge mission. At Tano there was another woman having the problem, and the guy was going to stretch the boot for her, and I was like, 'Well, can you stretch it for me?' And he was like, 'Well, you'd have to stretch it too far–I couldn't be responsible for the quality of the boot.' It became quite humiliating for me."

Finally, she compromised on a pair from a store called Tani on the West Side. "They were only 60 bucks. They are not even very nice quality. I got them in brown, not black, because they didn't have a style in black that I liked." And her mortification is driven home each day: As models saunter through the hallways of Elle clad in a rainbow of tall boots, Ms. Barnett can only gnash her teeth. "They have them in every color," she said. "It's so depressing. And I know that I can only have my brown pair."

Sara Nichols, 23, who works for the New Labor Forum, had her personal boot breakdown at Loehmann's. "They were black, zipper on the side, really nice–I would've bought them. They were probably in the $150 range. It's just embarrassing. Once you realize what's going to happen, you stop zipping. I'm not a fat person, but I have big calves! They're muscular. I mean, I run probably three times a week. I'm not a gym bunny ."

Ms. Nichols rejected the stretch-suede boot as "too 80's retro" and eventually settled on a compromise boot–"teenybopperish, thick, clunky"–from Skechers, the Generation Y footwear chain. "I look at other people's legs when they're wearing the big boots and I get pissed !" she said. "It's an enraging situation."

"You can put your leg into a smaller boot," said Ms. Morrison, the shoe designer. "One trick is just to point your toe–that will clench your calf muscle, and make your leg probably as slim as it ever is, and just … perseverance. Pack yourself in. Another trick is to push the boot leg down as you're zipping it, so that you're always zipping it at a slim part of your leg, below your calf–and then, once it's totally zipped up, you start slipping it up the leg, and as long as the boot shaft is a leather, it will give." She paused. "You may spend a couple of days wondering where your toes are."